We have been called to serve as Family History Support Missionaries in the England, London Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We will serve in the London Family History Centre for 18 months beginning January 2011, assisting people with their family history.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

One down 17 to go…

Dear family and friends,

We’re one month into our mission and settling in. We’ve found the grocery stores, dry cleaners and are beginning to understand the bus routes and underground. The one great thing about being over 60 in London is that you get free bus and tube rides. We are are making progress on how to run the appliances, but had a minor setback when we blew up the electric hair clippers.

We’ve never walked so much in our entire lives! London is teeming with people- it's fun to watch the Moslem ladies in their burkas, the school children in their uniforms and people from all over the world speaking a myriad of languages. The women and girls all seem to wear black- black tights, black coats and black flat shoes.

We work in the Family History Centre about 35 hours a week. Right now there are 4 missionary couples working, but one couple, Jim and Gerry Price go home to Arizona in about a month. We’ll miss them a lot as they have been our tutors, mentors and friends. Jim was an airline pilot and Gerry was a dental hygienist before retirement. Marilyn and John Crandall are from Mesa, Arizona and will be going home in September. John’s a retired dentist and Marilyn, a retired kindergarten teacher. Barbara and John Robertson are from Orem and came the week after we did. John is a retired BYU professor of Linguists and Barbara is our expert In Scottish family history. The director of our Centre is Sharon Hintze. She has lived in England and Switzerland for years and has been director of our centre for the past 10 years. She is knowledgeable about everything- genealogy, history and the British people.

We go sightseeing on most Saturdays. Last week we went with Prices to the British Museum (Fabulous), Harrods Department Store (wow) and Chipolte Mexican Grill.

We had the opportunity today to ride the train down to Surrey to go to the Temple. We traveled with 2 of the family history missionary couples ( The Prices and Robertsons), the missionary couple that runs the employment center (The Campbells), a single older sister missionary (Sister Groves)who also works in employment and a couple of American expats (The Allreds), our age, working in London. We also went in the visitors center.